No group in the history of mankind, (NOT the Wrestler,) has been as annoying, ineffective and as perversely pernicious as advertisers.
Their most effective techniques come from "The Triumph of Will" and other Nazi propaganda films by Lenni Rifenstahl. Those didn't sell anything, they grabbed you by your emotions and wrung your brain out until you'd swallow anything, including justification for euthenasia and genocide.
We REALLY have to improve search engines until their effectiveness can be demonstrated to be better than the noisy dross people are trying to full up our screens with. If the search engines are so desperate for revenue, and they are, why don't they try micro-payment adn set up an indexing service which would review pages and categorize them. I'd pay a nickel a search for the information I want and NOT what somebody wants to shove into my eyeballs.
The Web is a terrible place to advertise but until you can show something more effective, you're going to have these morons selling inappropriate use of the 'net and the web to other morons who are just reiterating their desperate efforts to perperuate themselves. (And annoying the crap out us all. in the process)
I stopped watching TV two years ago because I just couldn't be bothered to sit through 18 minutes of ads to be subjected to 42 minutes of product placement masquarading as content every hour.
I don't visit sites that carry advertising beyond my tolerance level. I no longer go to AltaVista, AskJeeves and several other sites because they're just junk, noise and dross.
Fact is the more you play (with words, with toys, with props, with yourself,) the smarter you are because play is learning.
Gifted children are recognizable as gifted adults because the one who managed to survive the educational system still exhibit almost childish delight in learning. New sh*t is "kewl".
Sadly, (for them,) a lot of people young or old, feel that play isn't worthwhile or take their play entirely too seriously to gain any cognitive benefit.
It becomes rote, repetition and drill instead of wonder and enlightenment. And they become Republicans or merely anal-retentive.
You're right and their wrong. How dare they do anything thing like announce their hardware and software at MacWorld Expo without consulting you?
They're going to announce new cool hardware and a real OS that they want people to use. How could they resent having you rain on their parade... You who make such a big impact on their bottom line.
It must suck being you. Everything looks so brown. Or is that 'cause you have your head up your ass?
C'mon guys. MacWord Expo's just around the corner and Apple want to announce lots of interesting things, most probably including the fact that they're about to become the largest supplier of Unix stations just like they became the largest supplier of RISC stations when the PowerPC came out.
Cut the guys a little slack. You'd be pissed as [expletive deleted] if somebody rained on your parade before it even starts. Give Apple the courtesy of letting them hold their dog&pony show bask in the expected earnings and then rip off their GUI.
The componentization of the PC industry and the economies of scale means that nobody makes cases anymore, nobody makes chassis anymore, nobody makes PC boards anymore and nobody makes anything distinguishable from the other guy anymore. Seems all you can do is buy cheap and assemble cheaper to sell on price alone.
That leads to an industry that's got zero interest in innovation and zero responsiveness to change.
If you can't convince a chassis maker, who's got a thousand mom-and-pop sweat-shop box builders besides you (so he couldn't care less about you or your idea,) that you need something different and it would behove him to make it, you're going to buy off the rack the same as everybody else and slit your own throat on price alone since you can't come up with anything different, never mind better.
The same goes for the PC board makers, the case makers, the component makers.
You don't stand a chance if your pin-outs aren't 100% compatible.
You don't stand a chance if your instruction set isn't 100% compatible.
You don't stand a chance of you cabling isn't 100% compatible (What the [expletive deleted] is the deal with these parallel/serial port "USB cable" kludges. Apple had the balls to make a port for it on their iMacs.)
This industry has [expletive deleted] itself to death. You the consumer have squat-all input in the process or the product because, even if you were willing to pay more, the people who want you to by only to sell you the same boxes as everybody else.
Face it. The reason Apple's designs look different is that the Mac buyers are paying what good design costs. I don't see a cool looking ultra quiet Cube on my office desktop anytime soon because my boss cares more about bucks than about me. But my den would make you drool.:-)
Apart from Apple, computers have become so boring, you want them to be invisible, except that they aren't and you rip your knuckles open installing anything. Used to be the desktop was where you worked, now its the space occupied by the monitor and the beige box. There's no room left to work.
Okay, I trust M$ about as much as a mouse trusts a snake, but the next round belongs to collaboration not to dog-eat-dog, its mine and you can't look at it or I'll sue your [expletive deleted] off.
XML, XSL and Schema are languages to communicate and they are consensual standards that NOT adhering to will cost too much to comtemplate. Not even M$ can take on their own client base and hope to win.
Failing in promotion and adoption of these standards will leave any perpetrator of lone systems looking like the schizophrenic guy sitting alone in his malodorous squalor on the subway, having fascinating and animated discussions, with nobody.
The world is changing with consortial and industry associations coming together to craft DTDs for their particular domains and building on the work others for the betterment of the whole instead of trying to lock anyone in.
DTDs are what its about If my DTDs can't work with your DTDs and my objects can't work with your objects then we both lose. If they do communiocvate and can translate between my proprietary format and you, then we both win.
Isn't it just like a library cardex? Guess what...
on
A Pair of Google Bits
·
· Score: 2
Here's a radical proposal. A search engine is like a library cardex. While the library buys the books, the publisher pays for the cards in the cardex.
Have the government financially support one pure research web site, like Google.com, and anyone and everyone who wants to have their web site's pages listed there needs to provide an XML description using a standard XML schema or DTD with links back to their own sites and web pages.
That should take care of mom-and-pop porn sites who don't do any indexing work while the governmental nature of the site takes care of the presence of ads. They don't need the revenue stream to survive.
That said, Linux has proved that M$ is vulnerable to the same stunt M$ pulled on NetScape to starve them of revenue.
DOJ not withstanding, look for M$ to try to shift their apps to the web and turn.NET "per use" charges for app use into their revenue stream. Windows as an OS will never get off the x86 platform but M$ will try to leverage off the winners of the next generations of platforms.
You can also forget about innovation (a.k.a. bloatware,) and that expensive crap for M$. Its about to become about maximising return on investment. That's why IBM was still selling 360 mainframe DOS well into the nineties. Puire gravy dude. Pure gravy.
The size of the contract determines the response time. My employers are no different from anmybody else in that respect. Its not the squeakyness of the wheel, its the size of the wheel.
Its called market responsiveness and if you're a small fry, your problems keep getting pushed to the end of the queue until it gets relegated to the next release. If your problem was crucial to you, you might have ceased to exist before the software publisher ever get around to it.
Even if nobody else considers your problems worth looking at (slim chance,) since you have the source code, you're not at anybody's mercy waiting for an upgrade that might or might not fix the problem. You can hire a Unix programmer, consultant or fix it yourself.
I trust M$ to report bugs, fixes and keep pages stable like a girl should trust a guy to "only stick it in a little."
Don't you know M$ products have no vulnerabilities and are perfect in every way. And if you reverse engineer it in anyway shape or form they'll have you drawn and quartered.
Of course, if you're they kind of low-life who's writing viruses, you could give a sh*t... "There's an M$ box, here the lock-pick set. Lets have fun." By the way, lock-picking sets in the hands other than a lock-smith's is illegal. That doesn't stop thieves.
Its a shame that M$ is trying to hide its deficiencies and prevent any criticism. This way people, its own customers, will break their legs in the pot holes and M$ trusworthiness will disappear.
This heavy-handed suppression is the kind of action that marked the functionning (or lack thereof,) of the Soviet Union. Along with five-year plans based on sheer mental masturbation and the inevitable subsequent show trials when reality reared its ugly head and bit the planners in the ass four years out.
The military has stepped in because Iridium is currently being used. By who? You guessed it. Its not going down until they get a replacement up there.
Nobody would give a crap if you sent down a satelite a day into the pacific. Nobody would even notice it anymore than they notice the hundreds of pounds of other cosmic crap that rains down on this planet every day.
I thought the idea was that we'd put up sites to hawk our wares, with product reviews by trusted individuals, register our pages with search engines and let people find us when they want us.
Instead we're cluttering up the screens and lives of people with constant noise trying desperately to catch the attention of people (and not making sales anyway.)
Advertising is the wrong application of internet technology. It is fundamentally irritating, annoying, expensive and a futile waste of resources.
In [cyber]space no one can hear you scream. No matter what you're screaming.
The European beggars are like Canadian beggars. University educated! Its not just the hookers who suck. Like they told Bush senior all those years ago: "Its the economy stupid."
If I was you I would not assume that I can just land somewhere and get a job.
Also there are little things like VISAS. If you don't have the proper visa, you may find yourself frog-marched to the border and flipped into a neighboring country or the nearest ocean.
The problem with finding any sign of life off of this festering and fragile is also its attraction.
This world will terminate and long before the sun turns into a red giant, swallows the earth in its orbit and turns it into slag on the swollen surface of a dying star.
We'll already have degenerated into an unstable orbit or had the moon continue to assume an eliptical and unstable orbit and smash into us or been crushed under ice or lava or died of plague or... You get the idea.
A single planet is like a single CPU architecture and a single OS. Vulnerable fragile and ultimately doomed.
Might as well hack off your testicles and carve out your ovaries because you're just condemming your progeny to oblivion.
Java' VM is very immature (the could take a page or five from the Smalltalk people who've been improving theirs since 1980,) and it shows.
Java the suite of libraries is in the same state as the VM and again could learn from the folks who've been at it a lot longer.
Java the IDE is pathetic except for IBM's VisualAge for Java which is almost as good as Smalltalk's IDE (VisualWorks, VisualAge for Smalltalk, Dolphin or even the late, lamented VisualWorksSmalltalk.)
Basically C++, C#, Java and Smalltalk (even Perl, CLOS and php,) as languages are roughly equivalent and its possible to write translators between them.
The IDEs are what make the difference and if you want a look at the best, check out Squeak to see just what you can get for free.
Don't let the syntax defeat you. Its actually the correct one for an object-oriented expression. If you can understand RPN calculators, you have the mental equipment to grok Smalltalk.
In fact its a challenge to the open source community. A FrameMaker clone outputting PDF. Lets merge it into the StarOffice suite.
Okay. E-mail me and we'll start drawing up specs. My forte is 3D visualization so I'm not the best person to do this but its got to start somewhere.
Lets take Frame Maker apart "at face value," list every presentation (aka: window, dialog box,) every button (aka: gadget, widget,) every menu item, draw up dialog descriptions (I have a diagramming technique to do this, I can email a copy of the article from the January 1990 issue of Computer Language Magazine, [it'll be on my site ASAP,]) and factor out an object structure to support all of the functionality.
I stopped buying CDs for USD$19..$21 when I decided I'd had enough of companies ripping me off. We're talking about 1,000% markup on merchandise and these imbecilic law suits by RIAA & MPAA & others who can't carry a fucking tune and certainly don't want to pay the musicians a fucking cent.
Don't call me a fucking crook. I buy from MP3.COM and direct from the artist and not from the multi-mega-buck churn mills who make sure that this week's hits are tomorrow's has-been to make space on the shelf more important than what you want to hear.
I loathe the slime that musicians have to deal with to get their music out. Been there, done that and the industry toadies can find a splintery telephone pole and impale themselves 'til their guts squirm out of their throats.
I've seen talentless scum who were willing to play the game get deals while better musicians than I got fuck-all and even the talent-challenged are now working as office temps because the mill guarantees that you make it against the industry not with it
The list of words, thoughts and concepts that we have had to be protected from spans the range from Carlin's famous Seven Words You Can't Say on Television to dodecahedron, the existence of which was thought by Helenic Greek philosophers to be too complex and powerful for mere mortals.
Some far-Eastern sects believe that saying the nine billion names of Rama will being about the end of the Universe.
Just saying the name of Jehova will bring death by lapidation (stoning) from some fundamentalist Jewish sects. ("Oy! Put down that rock!)
Just having the ability of giving birth to their sons condemns women to solitary confinement amongst the Taliban.
The litany of forbidden words would fill its own dictionary. Different words for different times and different places. The fun begins when they, those mystical, all-powerful illuminati,) set up mutually exclusive rules. Then you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
The issue has always been about control. Thou shalt not is not for your good but for your good not! Its about: Who's in charge here!
Setting one fundamentalist against the other doesn't work either. They merely get together to oppress you more together.
The trick is to propose something that is so ridiculous that it is unenforcable:
disembowelment for cursing, in any of a hundred languages about any of a hundred concepts;
decapitation for thinking about dental floss;
genitorture and mutilation for humming off-key;
immolation for dragging elections through the courts long after anybody cares who robs them blind;
castration for failing to deliver campaing promises
Slashdot Mirror
Dogs is already as passe as the Budwiser frogs. (When I gave up on TV. Its great. Now I READ.)
No group in the history of mankind, (NOT the Wrestler,) has been as annoying, ineffective and as perversely pernicious as advertisers.
Their most effective techniques come from "The Triumph of Will" and other Nazi propaganda films by Lenni Rifenstahl. Those didn't sell anything, they grabbed you by your emotions and wrung your brain out until you'd swallow anything, including justification for euthenasia and genocide.
We REALLY have to improve search engines until their effectiveness can be demonstrated to be better than the noisy dross people are trying to full up our screens with. If the search engines are so desperate for revenue, and they are, why don't they try micro-payment adn set up an indexing service which would review pages and categorize them. I'd pay a nickel a search for the information I want and NOT what somebody wants to shove into my eyeballs.
The Web is a terrible place to advertise but until you can show something more effective, you're going to have these morons selling inappropriate use of the 'net and the web to other morons who are just reiterating their desperate efforts to perperuate themselves. (And annoying the crap out us all. in the process)
I stopped watching TV two years ago because I just couldn't be bothered to sit through 18 minutes of ads to be subjected to 42 minutes of product placement masquarading as content every hour.
I don't visit sites that carry advertising beyond my tolerance level. I no longer go to AltaVista, AskJeeves and several other sites because they're just junk, noise and dross.
Chill dude.
Fact is the more you play (with words, with toys, with props, with yourself,) the smarter you are because play is learning.
Gifted children are recognizable as gifted adults because the one who managed to survive the educational system still exhibit almost childish delight in learning. New sh*t is "kewl".
Sadly, (for them,) a lot of people young or old, feel that play isn't worthwhile or take their play entirely too seriously to gain any cognitive benefit.
It becomes rote, repetition and drill instead of wonder and enlightenment. And they become Republicans or merely anal-retentive.
You're right and their wrong. How dare they do anything thing like announce their hardware and software at MacWorld Expo without consulting you?
They're going to announce new cool hardware and a real OS that they want people to use. How could they resent having you rain on their parade... You who make such a big impact on their bottom line.
It must suck being you. Everything looks so brown. Or is that 'cause you have your head up your ass?
C'mon guys. MacWord Expo's just around the corner and Apple want to announce lots of interesting things, most probably including the fact that they're about to become the largest supplier of Unix stations just like they became the largest supplier of RISC stations when the PowerPC came out.
Cut the guys a little slack. You'd be pissed as [expletive deleted] if somebody rained on your parade before it even starts. Give Apple the courtesy of letting them hold their dog&pony show bask in the expected earnings and then rip off their GUI.
The componentization of the PC industry and the economies of scale means that nobody makes cases anymore, nobody makes chassis anymore, nobody makes PC boards anymore and nobody makes anything distinguishable from the other guy anymore. Seems all you can do is buy cheap and assemble cheaper to sell on price alone.
:-)
That leads to an industry that's got zero interest in innovation and zero responsiveness to change.
If you can't convince a chassis maker, who's got a thousand mom-and-pop sweat-shop box builders besides you (so he couldn't care less about you or your idea,) that you need something different and it would behove him to make it, you're going to buy off the rack the same as everybody else and slit your own throat on price alone since you can't come up with anything different, never mind better.
The same goes for the PC board makers, the case makers, the component makers.
You don't stand a chance if your pin-outs aren't 100% compatible.
You don't stand a chance if your instruction set isn't 100% compatible.
You don't stand a chance of you cabling isn't 100% compatible (What the [expletive deleted] is the deal with these parallel/serial port "USB cable" kludges. Apple had the balls to make a port for it on their iMacs.)
This industry has [expletive deleted] itself to death. You the consumer have squat-all input in the process or the product because, even if you were willing to pay more, the people who want you to by only to sell you the same boxes as everybody else.
Face it. The reason Apple's designs look different is that the Mac buyers are paying what good design costs. I don't see a cool looking ultra quiet Cube on my office desktop anytime soon because my boss cares more about bucks than about me. But my den would make you drool.
Apart from Apple, computers have become so boring, you want them to be invisible, except that they aren't and you rip your knuckles open installing anything. Used to be the desktop was where you worked, now its the space occupied by the monitor and the beige box. There's no room left to work.
Okay, I trust M$ about as much as a mouse trusts a snake, but the next round belongs to collaboration not to dog-eat-dog, its mine and you can't look at it or I'll sue your [expletive deleted] off.
XML, XSL and Schema are languages to communicate and they are consensual standards that NOT adhering to will cost too much to comtemplate. Not even M$ can take on their own client base and hope to win.
Failing in promotion and adoption of these standards will leave any perpetrator of lone systems looking like the schizophrenic guy sitting alone in his malodorous squalor on the subway, having fascinating and animated discussions, with nobody.
The world is changing with consortial and industry associations coming together to craft DTDs for their particular domains and building on the work others for the betterment of the whole instead of trying to lock anyone in.
DTDs are what its about If my DTDs can't work with your DTDs and my objects can't work with your objects then we both lose. If they do communiocvate and can translate between my proprietary format and you, then we both win.
Here's a radical proposal. A search engine is like a library cardex. While the library buys the books, the publisher pays for the cards in the cardex.
Have the government financially support one pure research web site, like Google.com, and anyone and everyone who wants to have their web site's pages listed there needs to provide an XML description using a standard XML schema or DTD with links back to their own sites and web pages.
That should take care of mom-and-pop porn sites who don't do any indexing work while the governmental nature of the site takes care of the presence of ads. They don't need the revenue stream to survive.
Unless the sender gets special dispensation by contract, limiting users to between 10 & 100 emails a day should get rid of the entire problem of Spam.
That said, Linux has proved that M$ is vulnerable to the same stunt M$ pulled on NetScape to starve them of revenue.
.NET "per use" charges for app use into their revenue stream. Windows as an OS will never get off the x86 platform but M$ will try to leverage off the winners of the next generations of platforms.
DOJ not withstanding, look for M$ to try to shift their apps to the web and turn
You can also forget about innovation (a.k.a. bloatware,) and that expensive crap for M$. Its about to become about maximising return on investment. That's why IBM was still selling 360 mainframe DOS well into the nineties. Puire gravy dude. Pure gravy.
The size of the contract determines the response time. My employers are no different from anmybody else in that respect. Its not the squeakyness of the wheel, its the size of the wheel.
Its called market responsiveness and if you're a small fry, your problems keep getting pushed to the end of the queue until it gets relegated to the next release. If your problem was crucial to you, you might have ceased to exist before the software publisher ever get around to it.
Even if nobody else considers your problems worth looking at (slim chance,) since you have the source code, you're not at anybody's mercy waiting for an upgrade that might or might not fix the problem. You can hire a Unix programmer, consultant or fix it yourself.
I trust M$ to report bugs, fixes and keep pages stable like a girl should trust a guy to "only stick it in a little."
Don't you know M$ products have no vulnerabilities and are perfect in every way. And if you reverse engineer it in anyway shape or form they'll have you drawn and quartered.
Of course, if you're they kind of low-life who's writing viruses, you could give a sh*t... "There's an M$ box, here the lock-pick set. Lets have fun." By the way, lock-picking sets in the hands other than a lock-smith's is illegal. That doesn't stop thieves.
Its a shame that M$ is trying to hide its deficiencies and prevent any criticism. This way people, its own customers, will break their legs in the pot holes and M$ trusworthiness will disappear.
:-)
This heavy-handed suppression is the kind of action that marked the functionning (or lack thereof,) of the Soviet Union. Along with five-year plans based on sheer mental masturbation and the inevitable subsequent show trials when reality reared its ugly head and bit the planners in the ass four years out.
Please note where the Soviet Union is today
The military has stepped in because Iridium is currently being used. By who? You guessed it. Its not going down until they get a replacement up there.
Nobody would give a crap if you sent down a satelite a day into the pacific. Nobody would even notice it anymore than they notice the hundreds of pounds of other cosmic crap that rains down on this planet every day.
Well, that just tossed my CRT upgrade decisions into a cocket hat. If its as good as it looks, I want two!
Know anyone who wants to hold the morgage on a soul?
I thought the idea was that we'd put up sites to hawk our wares, with product reviews by trusted individuals, register our pages with search engines and let people find us when they want us.
Instead we're cluttering up the screens and lives of people with constant noise trying desperately to catch the attention of people (and not making sales anyway.)
Advertising is the wrong application of internet technology. It is fundamentally irritating, annoying, expensive and a futile waste of resources.
In [cyber]space no one can hear you scream. No matter what you're screaming.
Got a visa? You cant' work without it anymore than I can work in the states without being sponsored for a Visa.Hey Bozo.
The European beggars are like Canadian beggars. University educated! Its not just the hookers who suck. Like they told Bush senior all those years ago: "Its the economy stupid."
If I was you I would not assume that I can just land somewhere and get a job.
Also there are little things like VISAS. If you don't have the proper visa, you may find yourself frog-marched to the border and flipped into a neighboring country or the nearest ocean.
The problem with finding any sign of life off of this festering and fragile is also its attraction.
This world will terminate and long before the sun turns into a red giant, swallows the earth in its orbit and turns it into slag on the swollen surface of a dying star.
We'll already have degenerated into an unstable orbit or had the moon continue to assume an eliptical and unstable orbit and smash into us or been crushed under ice or lava or died of plague or... You get the idea.
A single planet is like a single CPU architecture and a single OS. Vulnerable fragile and ultimately doomed.
Might as well hack off your testicles and carve out your ovaries because you're just condemming your progeny to oblivion.
And where's the sense in that.
Java the language is adequate.
Java' VM is very immature (the could take a page or five from the Smalltalk people who've been improving theirs since 1980,) and it shows.
Java the suite of libraries is in the same state as the VM and again could learn from the folks who've been at it a lot longer.
Java the IDE is pathetic except for IBM's VisualAge for Java which is almost as good as Smalltalk's IDE (VisualWorks, VisualAge for Smalltalk, Dolphin or even the late, lamented VisualWorksSmalltalk.)
Basically C++, C#, Java and Smalltalk (even Perl, CLOS and php,) as languages are roughly equivalent and its possible to write translators between them.
The IDEs are what make the difference and if you want a look at the best, check out Squeak to see just what you can get for free.
Don't let the syntax defeat you. Its actually the correct one for an object-oriented expression. If you can understand RPN calculators, you have the mental equipment to grok Smalltalk.
This way we could look up the numbers online or in a great big book that would have all the phone numbers in the world.
Who thought this up? Was he pithed?
In fact its a challenge to the open source community. A FrameMaker clone outputting PDF. Lets merge it into the StarOffice suite.
Okay. E-mail me and we'll start drawing up specs. My forte is 3D visualization so I'm not the best person to do this but its got to start somewhere.
Lets take Frame Maker apart "at face value," list every presentation (aka: window, dialog box,) every button (aka: gadget, widget,) every menu item, draw up dialog descriptions (I have a diagramming technique to do this, I can email a copy of the article from the January 1990 issue of Computer Language Magazine, [it'll be on my site ASAP,]) and factor out an object structure to support all of the functionality.
By the way: PDF Good, closed spec.s BAD.
I stopped buying CDs for USD$19..$21 when I decided I'd had enough of companies ripping me off. We're talking about 1,000% markup on merchandise and these imbecilic law suits by RIAA & MPAA & others who can't carry a fucking tune and certainly don't want to pay the musicians a fucking cent.
Don't call me a fucking crook. I buy from MP3.COM and direct from the artist and not from the multi-mega-buck churn mills who make sure that this week's hits are tomorrow's has-been to make space on the shelf more important than what you want to hear.
I loathe the slime that musicians have to deal with to get their music out. Been there, done that and the industry toadies can find a splintery telephone pole and impale themselves 'til their guts squirm out of their throats.
I've seen talentless scum who were willing to play the game get deals while better musicians than I got fuck-all and even the talent-challenged are now working as office temps because the mill guarantees that you make it against the industry not with it
The list of words, thoughts and concepts that we have had to be protected from spans the range from Carlin's famous Seven Words You Can't Say on Television to dodecahedron, the existence of which was thought by Helenic Greek philosophers to be too complex and powerful for mere mortals.
Some far-Eastern sects believe that saying the nine billion names of Rama will being about the end of the Universe.
Just saying the name of Jehova will bring death by lapidation (stoning) from some fundamentalist Jewish sects. ("Oy! Put down that rock!)
Just having the ability of giving birth to their sons condemns women to solitary confinement amongst the Taliban.
The litany of forbidden words would fill its own dictionary. Different words for different times and different places. The fun begins when they, those mystical, all-powerful illuminati,) set up mutually exclusive rules. Then you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
The issue has always been about control. Thou shalt not is not for your good but for your good not! Its about: Who's in charge here!
Setting one fundamentalist against the other doesn't work either. They merely get together to oppress you more together.
The trick is to propose something that is so ridiculous that it is unenforcable:
disembowelment for cursing, in any of a hundred languages about any of a hundred concepts;
decapitation for thinking about dental floss;
genitorture and mutilation for humming off-key;
immolation for dragging elections through the courts long after anybody cares who robs them blind;
castration for failing to deliver campaing promises
You get the idea...